Suicide truck bomb kills 11 cops, injures 78 in Turkey

Suicide truck bomb kills 11 cops, injures 78 in Turkey

FPJ BureauUpdated: Thursday, May 30, 2019, 01:03 PM IST
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Turkish police and firefighters are parked near a damaged police headquarters after a car bomb killed eight Turkish police officers and injured 45 people on August 26, 2016 in Cizre, southeastern Turkey, an attack blamed on Kurdish militants, state media said. Two of the wounded were in a serious condition after the blast, which was carried out by the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), the state-run Anadolu news agency said. / AFP PHOTO / DOGAN NEWS AGENCY / STR / Turkey OUT |

Istanbul : Eleven Turkish police officers were killed and 78 people injured in a suicide truck bombing by suspected Kurdish rebels, three days into a two- pronged Turkish offensive against jihadists and Kurdish militia in neighbouring Syria.

  The early morning blast almost completely destroyed the police headquarters in the southeastern town of Cizre, just north of the Syrian border.

   “At 6:45 am (0915 IST), a suicide attack with a vehicle laden with explosives was carried out by the PKK terror group on the building of anti-riot police,” the provincial governor’s office said in a statement.

  Eleven police officers were killed and 78 people injured, three of them civilians, the statement added.

  Health Minister Recep Akdag said four people were in critical condition. The explosion went off hours after the Turkish military shelled positions held by Kurdish militia inside Syria.  Ankara has labelled the YPG, which has links to Turkey’s outlawed PKK, as a terror group bent on carving out an autonomous Kurdish region in Syria on the Turkish border.

   The blast in Cizre tore the facade off the four-storey police headquarters, sending up clouds of thick black smoke. Adjacent buildings were also badly damaged.

 The state-run Anadolu news agency said the bomb went off 50 metres away from the building at a control post.

Cizre, a majority Kurdish town, has borne the brunt of renewed violence between the outlawed PKK and government forces since the collapse of a ceasefire last year.  Turkish security forces have been hit by near daily attacks by the PKK since the two-and-a-half year truce collapsed, leaving hundreds of police officers and soldiers dead.  The latest bombing came at a critical moment, with hundreds of Turkish forces and dozens of tanks deployed inside Syria.

  Turkey sent four more tanks over the border, said an AFP photographer at Karkamis on the Turkish side of the frontier.

    Kurdish activists have accused Turkey of being more intent on preventing Kurds creating a stronghold along its border than fighting IS jihadists.

  But Prime Minister Binali Yidirim denounced as a “bare-faced lie” suggestions in Western media that the Syria operation was singling out Kurds.

“They either know nothing about the world, or else their job is to report a bare-faced lie,” Yildirim said.

  Ankara’s hostility to the YPG puts it at odds with its NATO ally, the United States, which supports the YPG in the fight against IS.

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